In this section you will find annotated links to web sites that feature English and Language Arts lesson plans and activities. These lesson plans and activities are designed principally for Middle School and High School English and Language Arts teachers.

Web English Teacher Carla Beard's incredible web site includes lesson plans and classroom ideas in a wide range of K-12 English and Language Arts categories. Find lesson plans on commonly taught books, poetry and many other topics.

Classroom technology tutorials & projects that foster student creativity & empowerment.

Readwritethink.org A partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation, ReadWriteThink offers a wide range of standards-based lesson plans that integrate Internet content into the teaching. Lessons can be selected according to grade band (K–2, 3–5, 6–8, 9–12) and area and each includes a detailed instructional plan. Lessons can also be sorted by "literacy engagements" to highlight specific language functions. ReadWriteThink also offers a collection of online interactiveStudent Materials to support literacy learning in the K-12 classroom. These interactive tools

EDSITEment: Literature and Language Arts EDSITEment offers a treasure trove for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality material on the Internet. All websites linked to EDSITEment have been reviewed for content, design, and educational impact in the classroom. EDSITEment is a partnership among the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of the Great City Schools, MarcoPolo Foundation and the National Trust for the Humanities.

• A Story of Epic Proportions: What makes a Poem an Epic?
• Hamlet and the Elizabethan Revenge Ethic in Text and Film
• Shakespeare's Macbeth: Fear and the “Dagger of the Mind”
• Critical Ways of Seeing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Context
• Dr. King's Dream
• Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Form of a Funeral
• Hawthorne: Author and Narrator
• It Came From Greek Mythology
• Letters from Emily Dickinson: 'Will you be my preceptor?'
• Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet
• Mark Twain and American Humor
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening: No Choice but Under?
• Shakespeare's Othello and the Power of Language
• Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Power of Nonviolence
• Profiles in Courage: To Kill A Mockingbird and the Scottsboro Boys Trial
• Slave Narratives: Constructing U.S. History Through Analyzing Primary Sources
• The “Secret Society” and FitzGerald's The Great Gatsby
• Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes: Poems for a Democracy
• What Makes a Hero?

PBS Teacher Source: Arts & Literature Go to the PBS Teacher Source for lessons and activities -- arranged by topic and grade level. PBS lessons and activities are carefully constructed and integrate their many fine web sites and videos. Most lessons are designed as video companions, but many do not require that you watch the video to complete the lessons.

• Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular: Listening Students read Wiesel's book "Night" and learn how listening is important to Jews and how it is a recurrent theme. They take this information, and use it to discuss ways that the Holocaust has been remembered and explained.
• Reclaiming the Self: The Legacy of Slavery Compare Twain's portrayal of slave life to the accounts in slave narratives, and explore the meaning of freedom to African-Americans through primary sources and poetry.
• Describing the Real How are historic, actual events or facts reconceived and recontextualized through point of view, interpretation, and opinion? The non-fiction essay, memoir, and epic will be explored through their visual counterparts.
• Adapting Shakespeare’s Classic Research the era when Shakespeare lived, write and respond to letters from the characters in ROMEO & JULIET, and write a script for an opera.
• Oedipus the King: Ancient Greek Drama Read Sophocles' famous work and explore what it reveals about ancient Greek culture.
• Comparing Film Adaptations View clips of the same Shakespeare scene in different film versions in order to engage in close critical analysis and to compare interpretations and visual styles.
• Images of Othello: A Shakespearean WebQuest Go on a WebQuest that includes textual references and on-line searches for images of Othello in various forms. Have students write an essay about the casting of Othello.
• Tolstoy: Anna Karenina Explore Russian society in the second half of the 19th century, literary comparisons, the value of art, and the ideal of family.
• Allen Ginsberg: Poetry and Politics Read Ginsberg's poems, read about the work of other writers in the Beat movement, and investigate the larger social and political climate in which they lived.
• Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms Use Capote's autobiographical short story, "A Christmas Memory", to teach a lesson on characterization in writing.

SCORE: Teacher CyberGuides The Schools of California Online Resources for Educators (SCORE) project is a great resource for teachers and students alike, though unfortunately its funding was cut in 2008. SCORE: Language Arts provides reviews of language arts web sites, lesson plans, teaching guides, all arranged by grade level and content area. The section's supplemental "CyberGuides" (several are listed below) are for grades 9-12 and provide teachers with activities and web resources. Some of these SCORE sites are dated so you should check for broken links.

• Reflections of the Harlem Renaissance
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Great Expectations
• The Pearl
• 1984
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Of Mice and Men
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Hamlet
• The Crucible
• Brave New World
• Brian's Song
• Canterbury's Tale
• Chicano Literature
• Virginia Woolf (Author study)

  SCORE: Teaching Activity Bank Included are various organizers and templates that may use it as an example to make your own or print it out and use it just as it is. Included are Graphic Organizers, Journaling Templates, Literature Templates, and Assessment Rubric

Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute: Curriculum Units The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is an educational partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools designed to strengthen teaching and learning in local schools and, by example, in schools across the country. Each participating teacher prepares a curriculum unit and provide examples of ways in which teachers have drawn material from Institute seminars for use in their own school courses. Some units are dated, so check links.

Some units of interest:

• Stories around the World in Film and Literature
• The Challenge of Intersecting Identities in American Society: Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Nation
• Children's Literature in the Classroom
• Representations of American Culture, 1760-1960: Art and Literature
• Teaching Poetry in the Primary and Secondary Schools
• The Craft of Writing
• Reading and Writing Poetry
• Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Art and Literature
• Women's Voices in Fiction
• Detective Fiction: Its Use as Literature and as History
• Reading Across the Cultures
• Twentieth Century Latin American Writing
• American Children's Literature

 

Blue Web'n: English Blue Web'n is an online library of 1800 + outstanding Internet sites categorized by subject, grade level, and format (tools, references, lessons, hotlists, resources, tutorials, activities, projects). You can search by grade level (Refined Search), broad subject area (Content Areas), or specific sub-categories (Subject Area).

The National Writing Project (NWP) is a professional development network that serves teachers of writing at all grade levels, primary through university, and in all subjects. Look in "Resources" sections for lessons on Teaching Writing, Teaching Reading, Research, Teacher Research/Inquiry, and Standards and Assessment

Education World Education World provides a wide range of lesson plans, curriculum and technology tips, and a wide variety of other resources. Visit its Language & Literature Subject Center
for more great lesson ideas and articles

EdHelper.com EdHelper.com serves as a clearinghouse of lesson plans for various subjects, mostly geared to younger students. Topics of interest include: Reading Comprehension, Read and Color Books, Literature Units, and Writing.

FRETWEB englishteaching.co.uk provides teaching resources, worksheets, lesson plans and schemes of work for teachers of English Language, English Literature, Media and Drama at the secondary level.

Teachers at Random teachers@random features complete teacher's guides to over 60 novels published by Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell.

WebQuest.org Use the "Curriculum x Grade Level Matrix" to find WebQuests from the SDSU database for a specific grade and curriculum area, ex. Language Arts.

Outta Ray's Head Teacher and librarian Ray Saitz has collected hundreds of Literature, Writing, English lesson plans.

TeachersFirst.com Go to Classroom Resources and click Content Matrix to find dozens of quality lesson ideas for elementary, middle school, and high school English courses. Many incorporate technology. Creating Poetry Videos Students make poetry come alive by creating a poetry video creates enjoyment and an interest in poetry.

The Folger Shakespeare Library Folger's provides great lesson plans, primary sources, and other resources for teaching Shakespeare.

teAchnology Broad site with Language Arts lesson plans

Creating a Web Site with Resources for Teaching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar "On a Shakespeare message board, teachers discussed the difficulty of helping today's high school students understand and enjoy Julius Caesar. Because she's an avid Shakespeare enthusiast, Sheryl Hinman decided that she could help. She and a few colleagues entered ThinkQuest for Tomorrow's Teachers, a competition for educators to collaborate in building academic sites. They worked for ten months to create the site of their dreams. Sheryl describes what they did and how they did it."

Virtual Tour Teaching Guide: Black Like Me This Virtual Museum teacher's guide for grade 9-10 is designed as background for Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. It was developed as part of the Schools of California Online Resources for Educators (SCORE) Project, funded by the California Technology Assistance Program (CTAP).

The Biography Maker Jamie McKenzie has developed a WebQuest that takes students through the stages of writing interesting biographies from Questioning through to Presentation.

Figurative Language This lesson focuses on identifying and creating similes, metaphors, and personification in literature and in students' own writing. Included are Notes on Figurative Language, Worksheet: Creating Figurative Language, and Model of Homework Poem all in PDF format.

Emotion or Reason As a result of this activity, students will be able to use persuasive devices to construct an oral or written argument. Students discuss the different types of persuasive devices that can be used in oral and written arguments (e.g., appeal to logic, appeal to emotion, personal anecdote, reference to commonly accepted beliefs, reference to expert opinion, cause-and-effect reasoning, comparison-contrast reasoning). Featured are online speeches by Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.

Education World: Revisiting Walden Pond in 2003 Educator Kathleen Modenbach reflects on a list-making activity that helped her students grasp Thoreau's sacrifices and appreciate his writing. Included are cross-curricular activities to extend the lessons of Walden Pond.

Every Punctuation Mark Matters: A Mini-Lesson on SemicolonsThis lesson, designed for grades 6-8, uses "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and online resources to explore to use of the semicolon.

Grammar Review Using "Jabberwocky"An innovative activity to have students identify parts of speech. The teacher will read the poem out loud from the web site http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html while the students follow along on their computers.

Make sure to visit our sister site "Teaching History with Technology" at thwt.org and learn about incorporating technology effectively in the history and social studies classroom.